Why Democrats are destined to be under-enthusiastic

Jonathan Chait attempts to answer the question of “why Democrats are chronically unenthusiastic”:

The Democratic base tends to lose interest in the threat of right-wing politics when their party holds power. Republicans, I’m guessing offhand, have had more success energizing their base during Republican rule. (Anybody want to quantify this?) Specifically I’m thinking of the 2002 and 2004 elections, which featured revved-up Republican bases despite total GOP control of government.

My seat of the pants analysis is that this reflects a psychological difference between the left and the right. The liberal coalition is more ideologically diffuse and attracted to individualism. Sometimes you see left-wing splintering at the end of periods of Democratic control — 1948, 1968, 2000 — but more often it’s simply harder to make liberals understand the urgency of preserving their party’s control of power against a hypothetical threat.

Two things: first, voter turnout in midterm elections is normally lower than it is in presidential elections, and second, while Chait gets at something in his analysis, I think he would be well-served by considering the role income plays in affecting voting rates.

If you were to make a quick list of core Democratic constituencies, it would look something like this: urban professionals, young people, labor, women (particularly single women), African-Americans, and Latinos. What’s more, if there is anything most of those groups share, it’s that they are disproportionately lower-income. And according to a 2008 population survey by the Census Bureau, registration and voting rates correspond directly with income. Voters in the $0 to $49,999 group are somewhat less likely to vote than voters in the $50,000 to $74,999 group and significantly less likely to vote than the $75,000 to $150,000-plus group.

With that in mind, the turnout question has a pretty straightforward answer; not only is turnout normally lower in mid-term elections, but all things being equal, lower-income voters are less likely to turnout in any given election than higher-income voters. And since those lower-income voters are also mostly Democratic, their low-turnout will disproportionately affect the Democratic Party. By contrast, high-income/high-turnout voters are mostly Republican, and since this is also good Republican year, it’s the case that the people most likely to vote are also the people most likely to be energized about the election.

Liberals have been pretty successful

cross-posted from Matthew Yglesias’ blog

I need help understanding how OpenLeft’s Paul Rosenberg can credibly argue that Barack Obama has manically embraced “discredited conservative ideas” and “helped enormously in extended the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Eara. [Emphasis his]” More specifically, I need help understanding this strange impulse among liberals of Rosenberg’s ilk to understate or dismiss most of the work Congress and President Obama have done over the past sixteen months, especially when — as David Leonhardt noted in yesterday’s New York Times — it’s been a burst of activity that “rivals any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition.”

Indeed, it’s not hard to list the liberal accomplishments of the last year and a half: the stimulus bill kept a deep recession at bay and invested billions in infrastructure, education and scientific research. The Affordable Care Act will provide health insurance to 32 million Americans, protect the insurance of millions more, and eventually guarantee health insurance to every American regardless of employment status. At present, Congress is on the verge of passing a financial reform bill that goes a long way towards preventing a reoccurrence of the conditions that led to the industry’s collapse in 2008.  And that’s to say nothing of small but important bills like the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, as well as the real revolution in the authority and power of the nation’s regulatory agencies.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been disappointments — Obama’s adoption of Bush-era detainee policy has been particularly galling — but on the whole, Obama’s presidency has been a success for the idea of liberal, activist government. Right now, liberals (again, of Rosenberg’s ilk) ought to spend less time lamenting Obama’s aversion to ideological orthodoxy and more time working to defend and improve progressive governance

All I ever really want to do is get nice/get loose and goof, my little slice of life

A final send off for the weekend: “Jimmy James” by the Beastie Boys

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Also, I’ll be guest-blogging for Matthew Yglesias this weekend and next week.  Stay tuned for more.

Live in Virginia, date an abuser, and want a restraining order? You're out of luck

I’m so dismayed by this that I’ve had a hard time trying to fit it into a broader post, so instead, I’m just going to provide the information as is. According to Newsweek’s Jessica Bennett, “Virginia is one of eight states that excludes people in dating relationships — in other words, unmarried couples or partners — from getting protective restraining orders, and for the past three years, the state has failed an annual assessment of domestic-violence-protection laws.”

In other words, even if she wanted to, Yeardley Love couldn’t have filed a restraining order against George Huguely, the UVA student charged with first-degree murder in her death. When you consider that partner violence is at its highest among women aged 16 to 24 — and that the median marriage age in Virginia (among women) is 25 — then you’re left with a status quo where the women who most need support from law enforcement are in the worst position to get it.

UVA’s president, John Casteen, has asked Governor McDonnell to pursue legislation that would compel police departments to notify universities in the event of a student’s arrest, and while that’s good, it isn’t nearly enough. Domestic violence is an incredibly taboo subject, and women — especially young women — have trouble knowing or admitting that they are in abusive relationships. Restricting the means through which women can find help and legal protection is a recipe for more silence and more abuse, and given the circumstances, the University should take the lead in changing this incredibly pernicious law.

Today isn't the day Obama promised we'd be out of Iraq

Over at his blog, E.D. Kain writes:

The potentially big viral video of the day is this one. It’s of Barack Obama promising, 16 months ago, that by today – May 21st, 2010 – we’d be out of Iraq.

Now politicians make promises and politicians break promises. I wish they’d make fewer so that they’d break fewer, but I certainly hope they don’t keep the ones they make simply because they value their word over the reality on the ground. Sure, honesty is the best policy as the saying goes, but should Obama really withdraw all American troops out of Iraq simply because he promised he would a year and a half ago? Should he do this despite any and all possible ramifications this might lead to – including increased violence and instability there?

It should be said that I agree with E.D’s general sentiment: it’s important to keep promises, but that needs to be weighed against the actual situation at hand. However, it isn’t entirely accurate to say that Obama broke his promise; one month after entering office, Obama gave a speech outlining his plan for withdrawing troops from Iraq. In it, he pledges to have combat brigades out of the country in the next 18 months or by August 31st, 2010. After combat withdrawal, a transitional force will remain until the end of 2011, at which the United States will withdraw all troops. You can watch this speech here:

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At present, the question isn’t “has Obama broken his promise?”  It’s “what has Obama done to move the nation closer to fulfilling his promise?” And by all accounts, the United States is on track to draw down to 50,000 troops by September 1st, 2010. Here’s the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole on the prospects for withdrawal:

There are now roughly 92,000 – 94,000 US troops in that country, down from 160,000 when President Obama was first elected. Another 5,000 are expected to come out in May, and the pace will pick up to 10,000 a month this summer.

[...]

The withdrawal isn’t entirely as advertised, of course, and won’t be as complete as the SOFA imagines. The 50,000 non-combat troops in Iraq as of September will actually be combat troops rebranded as trainers, and will include 4500 special operations forces actively tracking down and fighting guerrilla cells. But aside from the special operations guys, most of the US troops will not be doing active war fighting and will in fact mostly be training Iraqi troops, the quality and capabilities of which are definitely improving.

From September 2010 until December 2011, roughly 3,000 troops on average will come out each month (though that is just an average and the departures may be more bunched up at some points).

In the end, a very small force may remain, of trainers, special operations, and air force. Iraq’s air force planes and helicopters have been ordered but won’t arrive until 2013 and Iraqi pilots will need long and complicated training on them. The remaining US troops will be there, if at all, with the consent of the Iraqi government. They are unlikely to do any war fighting at all on their own.

I don’t know as much as I should about our Iraq policy, but Juan Cole does, and I trust that his optimism is justified. If our withdrawal from Iraq is on schedule — and it seems to be — then I think President Obama deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

Some final thoughts on Rand Paul's brand of libertarianism

Not to spend too much time on this, but Friend of the Blog Matt Zeitlin has the right take on the limits of Rand Paul’s brand of libertarianism:

It’s worth noting that, following Matt Yglesias, that the position that the core provisions of the Civil Rights Act are not in fact good ideas isn’t necessarily racist, it is instead that Paul has “an excess of honesty and ideological rigor” and simply extends basic libertarian principles to the natural conclusion that the government has no right to interfere with private association and business dealings.

But just because Paul — and, at the time, conservatives like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley — came to this conclusion in a different way than, say, Strom Thurmond, doesn’t really exculpate them, it is just really good evidence for why serious libertarianism is a bad political philosophy and leads to abhorrent real-world results. That a fairly simple application of a set of political ideas leads one to conclude that truely entrenched and institutionalized racism is something that the government can’t really do anything about is grounds for rejecting the political philosophy.

Like I said earlier, many libertarians seem incapable of recognizing that the state isn’t the only source of oppression, and that there are other concerns outside the maintenance and protection of private property. I can agree that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 infringed on the right of business owners to serve who they pleased (as did Jim Crow laws, for that matter), but that pales in comparison to the huge loss of liberty caused by Jim Crow.

As a concern, the rights of private property need to be balanced against basic justice and fairness. Allowing businesses and communities the right to discriminate may have been in line with a respect for private property, but given the history of slavery and widespread racism, it amounted to a massive abrogation of freedom for a huge number of Americans. And that, by far, outweighed any liberty lost by folks who didn’t want to let a black person onto their lunch counter or into their department stores. To put it another way, the liberty gained by allowing some Americans live free of institutionalized racism was much — much — greater than the liberty maintained by letting some Americans to freely discriminate.

Ezra Klein says the problem with Paul is his extremism, but I’m not so sure. Extremism certainly factors into it, but at basic, the problem is that Rand Paul’s libertarianism is a fundamentally untenable blend of conservative resentment and basic anti-statism. It’s useless as a governing philosophy, and as we’ve seen with other Tea Partiers, completely unsuited to anything other than juvenile grievance politics.

New study: immigration associated with lower crime rates

I know the Arizona immigration controversy has mostly dropped off the radar, but immigration is still a pressing policy challenge, and point of contention between restrictionists and immigration advocates is whether immigrants — illegal or otherwise — contribute to crime rates and social ills. For those of you on the restrictionist side of things, here is something interesting to chew on:

“Cities that experienced greater growth in immigrant or new-immigrant populations between 1990 and 2000 tended to demonstrate sharper decreases in homicide and robbery,” Wadsworth writes. “The suggestion that high levels of immigration may have been partially responsible for the drop in crime during the 1990s seems plausible.”

Drawing from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and U.S. Census data, Wadsworth analyzed 459 cities with populations of at least 50,000. Wadsworth measured immigrant populations in two ways: those who are foreign-born and those who immigrated within the previous five years.

Wadsworth focused on medium and large cities because about 80 percent of violent crime takes place there. Wadsworth says distinguishing legal and illegal immigration is difficult, as the U.S. Census does not track those numbers, but he notes that immigrant citizens and non-citizens often live together in the same communities.

He tracked crime statistics for homicide and robbery because they tend to be reported more consistently than other crimes. Robberies are usually committed by strangers—which increases the reporting rate—and “homicides are difficult to hide,” he says.

Using long-term analyses, Wadsworth notes, cities that experienced the largest growth in the proportion of foreign-born and newly arrived immigrant populations experienced larger decreases in violent crime between 1990 and 2000. That finding, Wadsworth wrote, “suggests that Sampson may be right—that immigration may be partly responsible for the decrease in violent crime.”

This makes intuitive sense; someone moving into the United States to work voluntarily for money probably isn’t interested in jeopardizing their employment by way of crime or illegality. If immigrants are a disproportionate share of the population in many urban centers, and less likely to break the law, then they would contribute to an overall decrease in crime. In any case, the evidence continues to mount that on the whole, immigration is good for the United States. The challenge is in making the process as streamlined, straightforward and fair as possible.

Obama administration unveils a slightly less unreasonable drug policy

With the elections and such, this has all but gone under the radar, but it’s still worth mentioning. On Tuesday, the Obama administration unveiled its new strategy for drug-control policy:

The Obama administration unveiled a new drug-control policy Tuesday that emphasizes community-based prevention and the role of doctors in screening for drug problems, signaling a shift in strategy while continuing to embrace key tenets of the decades-old war on drugs.

[...]

The White House’s first anti-drug plan calls for prevention at the local level through mentoring programs and education initiatives, not just for children, but also for their parents at the workplace, as well as expanding treatment programs from specialty facilities to community health centers. The policy also lays out a series of five-year goals that include cutting youth drug use by 15 percent, drug-caused deaths by 15 percent and instances of “drugged driving” by 10 percent.

Unfortunately, and as Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Alliance points out, the Obama administration is still overly focused on “law enforcement and supply-and-control strategies that have never worked well in the past.” Indeed, Obama’s nominee for the DEA — acting administrator Michele Leonhart — is a drug warrior of the highest order, having built her career on the relentless pursuit of marijuana growers and users:

Leonhart was also there at the beginning of the federal assault on California’s medical marijuana law. She stood beside US Attorney Michael Yamaguchi when he announced in a January 1998 press conference that the government would take action against medical marijuana clubs. And as SAC in Los Angeles up until 2004, she was the ranking DEA agent responsible for the numerous Bush administration raids against patients and providers.

Her apparent distaste for marijuana extended to researchers. In January 2009, she overruled a DEA administrative law judge and denied UMass Professor Lyle Craker the ability to grow marijuana for medical research.

And it wasn’t just marijuana. She was in full drug warrior mode when she attacked ecstasy use at raves in 2001, telling the New York Times that “some of the dances in the desert are no longer just dances, they’re like violent crack houses set to music.”

Leonhart’s nomination nomination sends a clear signal that the Obama administration intends to remain hewed to the drug war status quo, where law enforcement tears through the Constitution in its relentless effort to stop consenting adults from using mood altering substances in the privacy of their homes. Absent any competing information, it’s safe to say that a more sensible approach — where law enforcement focuses on mitigating the negative effects of the drug trade — is completely off the table.

It’s worth saying that I don’t mean to minimize the change in drug strategy; it’s genuinely good that the administration plans to invest more resources in treatment and prevention. Still, the administration’s approach remains predicated on the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong about using drugs, and that that something is best controlled by unleashing and targeting the state’s police power at (certain classes of) people who choose to indulge.

Pennsylvania and Arkansas weren't anti-establishment elections

The striking thing about David Broder’s analysis of Tuesday’s elections isn’t that it’s wrong — and it is — but that it’s incredibly lazy. He’s clearly going through the motions here, and that makes for a bad and large uninformative column:

But we saw the anti-Washington sentiment Tuesday in Kentucky, where Rand Paul, the physician son of libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, easily defeated Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s handpicked candidate for the Republican nomination for a vacant Senate seat — and credited his win to the Tea Partyers.

The same sentiment carried to Arkansas, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was forced into a runoff by her labor-backed challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

And it claimed its largest victim of the year so far in Pennsylvania’s Sen. Arlen Specter. Run out of the Republican Party last year by a GOP challenger, he fell embarrassingly to a less-known younger congressman in a bid for the Democratic nomination. His failure showed the Obama White House once again to be a toothless tiger — with its endorsements now having failed in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. No good news for the president there.

Like I said yesterday, it doesn’t make any sense to think of Sestak’s win in Pennsylvania or Halter’s success in Arkansas as part of an “anti-Washington” or “anti-establishment” wave. Unlike Rand Paul, who actually ran against the GOP establishment, both Sestak and Halter campaigned on a pledge of greater fealty to President Obama and the Democratic agenda. There is nothing remotely “anti-establishment” about supporting a candidate who promises to be a more faithful member of the political establishment.

As for Broder’s assessment of Obama’s political operation, it suffices to say that Broder — by virtue of his long-time in Washington — doesn’t actually understand that for some elections, parochial concerns are far more salient than the “national mood.” In Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts especially, Republican success (and Democratic failure) had far more to do with local concerns than it did with the President’s popularity.

Rand Paul fails epically on the Rachel Maddow Show

Rand Paul’s performance on last night’s Rachel Maddow Show was epic, and not in a good way. To give a little background, yesterday Paul gave an interview to the Louisville Courier-Journel, in which he seemed to say that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had he been in the Senate.  His rationale?  He doesn’t like the idea of telling private business owners that they can’t discriminate.  Maddow tried to get him to clarify his remarks, but he wasn’t having any of it:

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This is only the first part of the interview (you can find the second here), but I’m not exaggerating when I say that Rand was palpably uncomfortable throughout.  At no point did Paul give Maddow a straight answer, and when it was clear that he couldn’t spin his way out of Maddow’s questioning, he took to dismissing the whole issue on the basis of its “obscurity” and irrelevance to the Kentucky Senate race.  By the end of the interview however, Paul had all but restated his original view: the Civil Rights Act was fine when it came to prevent public discrimination, but went off the rails in criminalizing discrimination by private businesses and establishments.

Paul claims that he isn’t a racist and abhors discrimination, and I completely believe him.  But that doesn’t change the fact that Paul, like many libertarians, has an incredibly blinkered view of oppression and liberty.  Simply put, and for reasons that I think have a lot to do with the demographics of the movement (read: a lot of white guys), libertarians have a habit of fixating on the state and its role in perpetuating oppression and constraining liberty, with many libertarians completely blind to the fact of oppression by culture and custom.  It simply doesn’t register.  As such, it’s no surprise that libertarians like Paul can make arguments about the desirability (or lack thereof) of the Civil Rights Act without once considering the oppression that can flow from ostensibly “just” arrangements of private property

As a quick and final note, the fact that many libertarians still have yet to grasp the fact that oppression comes from a variety of sources, is to me at least a sign that libertarians — or at least those working within the Republican Party — aren’t concerned with “liberty” as much as they are eager to turn the state away from the least-well off and back towards the privileged.  But that’s a different post.